Some European Union countries, led by Italy, are pushing to normalize ties with Syria in order to facilitate deportations of migrants as mainstream leaders look to replicate anti-immigrant far-right parties’ surging popularity across the Continent.
“It is necessary to review the European Union Strategy for Syria and to work with all actors, to create the conditions for Syrian refugees to return to their homeland in a voluntary, safe and sustainable way,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Tuesday to the Italian Senate ahead of the EU leaders’ meeting.
After dictator Bashar Assad’s violent crackdown on protesters in 2011 spiraled into a bloody civil war, his government was accused of using chemical weapons on its own people and was accused of torture.
The EU cut off diplomatic ties with the country in 2011. The regime survived and its operations continued in major part due to the military support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The civil war has since ground to a standstill and the Syrian president has faced near-total global isolation.
Meloni plans to raise the relationship with Damascus during a meeting of the 27 EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday, two EU diplomats told POLITICO.
Those calls from one of the EU’s largest countries come on top of a concerted push by a group of others, some of which have hard-right or far-right parties in government (or supporting government), such as Austria and Hungary.
The push to normalize relations with war-torn Syria and its president comes after a surge in support for anti-immigrant parties after the European election in June, namely France’s National Rally and Germany’s Alternative for Germany.
In recent weeks, Poland’s prime minister has drawn a rebuke from the EU executive for saying that Warsaw would suspend asylum rights for migrants coming to Poland via Belarus, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has shut his country’s borders to EU neighbors following a knife attack allegedly involving a migrant and France’s newly appointed prime minister, Michel Barnier, has said EU rules on deportations should be revised to speed up expulsions.
One EU diplomat echoed Meloni, saying Israel’s ground operations after its invasion of Lebanon in early October added momentum to the push for deporting Syrian migrants. Nearly 200,000 Syrians and Lebanese have fled to Syria since the start of October, according to the U.N. In Europe, more than 1 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in the past 10 years, according to 2021 data from the UN Refugee Agency.
“The situation in the Middle East has completely changed the discussion,” the EU diplomat said, referring to the current war in Lebanon.
Assad’s charm offensive
President Assad’s government, for its part, is eager to return to the embrace of its neighbors and other global leaders. In 2023, he received a hug from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting of Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia (the country initially backed some Syrian rebels), which he attended for the first time in over a decade.
He has led a charm offensive for years, telling Syrians who fled it is now safe to return. In 2016, Assad told a group of Russian journalists, “We encourage every Syrian to come back to Syria.”
More recently, Syria has been bankrolling a campaign by Western influencers to clean up his country’s image and jumpstart tourism, which has been largely dead for a decade.
But officials have not mapped out how such a shift to normalizing ties might happen. “There is no one who says: we will pick up the phone to call Assad,” said one EU official. “Nobody dares to raise that, but it is a hidden suggestion by some.”
In July, seven EU countries (Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, Croatia and Cyprus) called on the EU’s foreign policy chief to review the EU’s strategy for Syria. The goal, they said, was to improve the humanitarian situation in Syria as well as help return migrants to certain regions of the country.
For others, it’s more complicated.
The Netherlands is not ready to back plans for restarting negotiations with Syria as it is not considered a safe country according to the Dutch domestic assessment, its Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp told POLITICO.
“The Dutch policy is that Syria is not secure to return asylum seekers. If that will happen in the future, [it] depends on the whole mechanism which is depoliticized [for] the Netherlands to decide to what extent Syria is secure, safe enough for the return of migrants,” he added.
The EU foreign policy chief’s response to the letter from seven EU countries was curt.
“How the Syrian regime has been operating for decades is well known and documented, including with the direct support of both Russia and Iran,” Josep Borrell wrote in a letter dated August 28 and obtained by POLITICO.
“That said, rest assured that the EU has always been ready to explore ways to better support the Syrian people and its legitimate aspirations.”
But some within the EU are adamant it is time to, at the very least, start a discussion, even if it is “too early to say whether we can succeed in anything,” one senior EU diplomat said.
“Assad is there, there is no whitewashing of him but Europe has taken in over 1.2 million Syrian citizens,” said Austria’s Alexander Schallenberg, federal minister for European and international affairs.
“Our proposal is an open-minded assessment: where do we stand, where should we go, because we are simply not achieving the results we would like to achieve.”
Stuart Lau contributed reporting.
